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ILL Robinson writes "Just finished reading a great interview with Oddworld president, Lorne Lanning, over on VFX World. In the interview, Lorne speaks of the latest in real-time 3D technologies and Machinima, and how it relates to not only game graphics, but also how it will impact filmmaking in general. He also speaks about Epic Game's latest engine, Unreal3, and how powerful and impressive the latest Epic Games engine is."

of course i'm biased (i'm the project lead), but these articles do nothing to help the machinima community, which is almost exclusively indie (no budget) and needs tools that are affordable and commercial quality...

You know, I found myself marveling at the quality of 3d graphics that can be done on today's hardware. I remember my Super Nintendo, and how great the graphics on it were. Then I remember buying a 3d accelerator card, a Voodoo Blaster Banshee (16MB PCI) and playing OpenGL quake2 for hours. I swore to myself, "It'll never get any better then this [marky.com]" Boy was I wrong. I can remember a dozen games that wowed me at the time, but are now totally unimpressive. That is the nature of computer generated graphics.

Whaddya mean "whats the point"? The point is, exciting new tools for machinima developers will be available within just a few years here, enabling them to take their art to entirely new levels. Oh boo-hoo, it won't be available for two years. Why the hell would Slashdot even exist if everyone went "Whats the point?" every time some exciting new future technology was announced? We thrive off this shit man!

And anyways, if you're looking for some definitive 'reviews' for existing machinima tools, I highly su

I saw the new Unreal engine demo running behind closed doors at this year's GDC. It was on an unreleased NVidia part, but was running at a pretty high res and at least 30fps... and it was beautiful. Screenshots don't do it justice.

A machinima version of Michael Jackson's Thriller using Second Life's custom animation feature can be found here [ulrikasheim.org]. The graphics are as good as UT and Second Life provides in-world tools to create sets, costumes, and props. Custom animations can then be uploaded to animate characters. It's a machinimist's dream!

If you are a machinimist and would like to sign up [secondlife.com] for a free trial of Second Life, enter "Ulrika Zugzwang", the film's creator, in the "Resident Referral" box and join the in-world film-production crew.

I think it's interesting to note though that what really makes Unreal Engine 3 powerful is the tools. The truth is that even the open source OGRE [ogre3d.org] engine supports all of the graphics features of Unreal Engine 3: